Boxcar Pushes Towards The Future With Realtime Notifications On The Web

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I love Boxcar. In a world where the iOS Push Notification system is pretty much a nightmare, it allows me to sleep easy. We’ve writtenabout it a number of times before, but essentially, it’s an app that allows you to get Push Notifications for a wide range of services — and more importantly, it allows you to organize those messages in a manageable manner. And now their bringing that notification system to the web.

The latest version of Boxcar’s website launches today. You’ll notice that it has been completely revamped to give users a pleasing interface that utilizes a Twitter-like two-pane stream system. But more significantly, it also now gives you notifications when new messages come in to any of the services you’ve tied to your Boxcar account.

“Using the latest WebSockets technology, just like Twitter, we’re delivering thesame real-time notifications that you receive on your device to your browser,” creator Jonathan George tells us. These notifications appear both in the browser tab (this shows the number of new messages you have), and as a little notification bar at the bottom of the browser (though this is currently only in the Boxcar window itself and not browser-wide).

“This is a huge milestone for us and marks the transition for Boxcarfrom being just an app, to an internet service. From here we’ll be bringing real-time notifications to every device imaginable,” George says. “The Boxcar philosophy is that we want to deliver actionable, relevantmessages to you – wherever you’re at. iOS was the first step, and now it’s time to start delivering on that premise,” he continues.

This close connection between mobile apps with web apps is a very cool trend we’re seeing. For example, I love using the Belugamessaging app on my iPhone, but also being able to use it in the browser when I’m sitting down. Now I can check Boxcar on the go, or when I’m sitting at my computer as well.

Incredibly, George says they’ve served up over 700 million Push Notifications now.